


opta ardua pennis astra sequi

by Anonymous



Category: Final Fantasy VI
Genre: Flashbacks, Maritime Survival Story, Multi, Polyamory, Steampunk, Transgender Daryl (FFVI), Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-16 08:34:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29079426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: She's always wanted to go faster, get higher, have more freedom, smash past every doubt and fear and rise into some loftier, clearer state.  A collapsible raft in the middle of the Great Sea, with injured crewmen and food running out is... not that.
Relationships: Daryl/Setzer Gabbiani/Maria
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3
Collections: Five Figure Fanwork Exchange 2020





	1. What Goes Up

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wallwalker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wallwalker/gifts).



_Kohlingen was cold. May was nice enough. So was June, when the little blue mistflowers bloomed everywhere underfoot. July and August were pleasant by anyone’s standard. The rest of the year, Kohlingen was a cold town, with clear watery light that poured over the rocky hills and the pine trees that stood up like goose pimples from the gray-green flesh of the earth, and glimmered on the winding black river that gave the town its name. But if you were born there, if you grew up there, and you never left, you didn’t realize the cold the way outsiders did, or the way the merchants who traveled to desert Figaro or garden Jidoor did._

_It was October and Daryl had left her mittens, scarf, and hat in the house in her hurry to come stand by her father in the square, half-dancing with impatience and half-listening to the trader saying that it was lucky the caravan had got over the passes when it had, or they’d have gotten snowed in on the wrong side of the mountains. Her father wasn’t any more interested in the man’s woes than Daryl, and he asked briskly if all his herbs and reagents had arrived safely._

_“Yes, yes,” said the trader. Kohlingen’s square consisted of the market building on the north, the council house on the west, the inn and pub to the south, and the farmers’ market stalls lining the riverbank to the east. Just now, the space was filled up by traders, ostlers, and shopboys unloading great packs from the backs of horses, mules, and donkeys, and also by every other citizen of the town, eager to pick up their orders, to see what would be offered for sale in a few days, or just to see what other people had got._

_The trader went to a raw-boned mouse-colored jenny who showed no reaction to the clamor around her, her brown eyes placid and her long ears occasionally twitching to shake off a gnat. He untied ropes, moved swathes of canvas and leather bags, and finally drew out a satchel that her father reached for eagerly._

_Daryl was not paying attention at this point. Her eyes were on something above the crowd, on the far side of the square. Faces around her were pointing up, fingers too. Against the dark stone houses and pale grey sky, bright spheres of color as large as Daryl’s head were floating, striped in crimson red, mustard yellow, new-leaf green, and mistflower blue. Below each orb was a little gleaming basket carrying a nearly see-through flame._

_The trader chuckled, seeing Daryl’s face. “Look at your lad,” he said to her father. “All the boys in Figaro look just like that. They’re all mad for balloons. Y’ought to buy one of the little toys for him.”_

Daryl snapped the last button on her boot and stood, shaking back her hair. She ran one hand through the right side of it, raking the damp yellow strands back into place.

“Why don’t you leave it?” came Setzer’s dry voice, sounding tired and satisfied. “You look lovely tousled.” His hand reached over, tugging impishly at the gold sash tied around her waist.

She caught his hand to stop him, tangling her fingers with his. “The wind’ll wreck it soon enough, but at least I’ll look put-together while I go past your cargo of dissolute wretches.”

“Hey, now,” he said mildly, stroking her fingers with his. “Those are the third and second children of the leading houses of Jidoor you’re speaking of. _Dissolute_ is too kind a word.”

She laughed and twisted around, putting one knee on the bed to lean across and kiss the top of his head. His arm went around her hips, his face pressed into her chest. Strands of his long silver-white hair clung to her lips as she raised her head and fell away as she spoke. “Debauched? Degenerate? Degraded? Wretches, though, for sure. Won’t you ever get tired of catering to them and come join me in Figaro?”

His arrogant nose wrinkled. “And work for a _government_? And an ally to the Empire, at that? You wound me, love.”

Impatience prickled over her like heat rash. “I’ve told you, they’re not really allies. Your ship’s too good for this casino work, Setzer. If you’d at least let the Society put instruments on her, so we could have two sets of measurements, both the _Falcon’s_ and the _Blackjack’s_ , then -”

“Never happening,” he declared, pinching her rear through her thin fawn breeches. She tweaked his nose for that and pulled away. 

Her coat, scarlet wool and cloth-of-gold, was tossed over a chair set beside the crackling fireplace. She put it on and then her violet leather gloves. The vivid colors should have clashed, but Daryl had an eye for shades and hues, and instead they went together, balanced out by her emerald blouse and fall of yellow hair to create something sumptuous and rich.

“Listen,” she said. “We’re all set for our next test flight. We’ve moved things around, got rid of a few things, replaced a few others, made everything lighter. We should get even higher this time. But you know how it is, you can never tell how stable everything is until you try it out. If we’ve erred…”

He sighed, flopping backwards on the bed and casting an arm over his eyes, all flowing hair and pale skin moving smoothly over muscle, his duel scars gleaming in the firelight. His loose white blouse and tight black breeches were still unlaced, and the sheets were rucked up around him. He looked good enough to eat. He knew it, too. She could see it in the coy smile visible under the dramatic arm.

She refused to be distracted. “No. I’ve got places to be.”

The dramatic arm shifted so he could prop himself up on it, still posed seductively, but now his expression was unhappy. “What are you trying to prove by pushing your ship so hard?” he asked. “Reaching the stars? You can’t be serious. It’ll kill you.”

She smiled. “It’ll be a worthy death.” His frown sharpened and his eyes grew suddenly hurt. She came back to the bed, caressed his bare foot with her gloved hand. “Don’t worry. We’re not going to the stars quite yet.” His expression didn’t change. She shook his foot gently. “Listen. Asteria has a grandkid now. She’s told me she wants to spend more time at home. If something does go wrong on this flight, if the worst should happen to me, I want _you_ to have the Falcon.”

He lay still, staring at her, at the obligation she was laying on him. “What’ll I do with two ships?” he finally muttered sulkily, and sat up, lacing in silence and pulling on his own coat of sweeping black panels and regal embroidery. He kept his back to her, his shoulders stiff. 

“Don’t be an ass,” she said. Then lighter, teasing, “I know that’s very hard for you.”

He swung around, his gambler’s grin back in place. “Nonsense! I’m the very epitome of a gentleman. I’ll make you a wager, instead - I’ll win the _Falcon_ from you when I whip you in a race. I’m not letting you out of my sight until then.”

“Ha!” She laughed and pushed his shoulder. He swayed back, easily keeping his balance. “Good luck with that, buster. You’re always welcome to _try_.” She went out of his cabin, smiling to herself. Count on Setzer to do what she wanted, so long as he could frame it in his own terms.

_The opera house was overwhelming, crowded and noisy and hot, the people in the lobby all crushed in with each other, everyone talking too loudly to be heard. Daryl, accustomed to the wild windiness of balloon baskets and airskiff decks, felt nearly faint. She waved her lace fan at her face like she was pumping a bellows, prompting a frown from a delicate girl nearby. She fluttered her own fan as delicately as petals trembling in a gentle breeze, as though trying to show Daryl how it was done._

_Daryl grinned as charmingly as she could manage, considering how ill she felt. The young woman looked startled, then morphed it into another polite frown. She turned back to the elderly gentleman whose arm she was attached to. She was much too young for him._

_Daryl stayed looking at her, enjoying the shape of her in her scanty gown of watercolor sea-foam pattern silk, and how her hair fell down her back, the pale golden tresses tied at intervals with ribbons of lace. She entertained herself for a minute, imagining pulling each of those neat bows loose, how the threads would feel as they caught on her work-roughened fingers, how the girl’s silken hair would billow out as it was freed._

_Asteria’s elbow knocked into her side. Daryl’s head whipped around. The older captain whispered out of the side of her mouth. “Your eyes are glazed. Try not to look so bored.”_

_“I am not bored,” she insisted, “only hot.” It was good Asteria had distracted her. Daryl didn’t need to overheat herself any further._

_“We’ll go to the box any minute. Help me ‘til then.”_

_The two of them were here as guests of Lord and Lady Ruyik, whose heir was mad for airskiffs. So they already had one patron in the bag, but successful schmoozing tonight could net them more, meaning more funds for the next stage of the_ Falcon’s _construction. Figaro’s Royal Society of Engineers had a hundred plates in the air at once, and there were always some in danger of falling. The hybrid airship, with its stiff metal skin over a gas-filled bag, its dozen rotors, its larger size and durability compared to the airskiffs, was a pet project of many Society members, but its development cost an eye-popping amount of gil. Infusions of outside cash were necessary to keep progress smooth._

_So Daryl glued her smile back on, took a cold drink from every tray that floated past atop the hand of a white-gloved waiter, and did her best to be charming. She had the looks for it, at least, even if no would ever celebrate her as a society beauty. She had good shoulders and a narrow waist, and her stylish dress lent her the appearance of luscious hips. Her hair was more yellow than gold, her chin too strong, and years exposed to the elements had weathered her skin darker and tougher than Jidoor society admired, but her eyes were large, bright, and lovely, she had an easy, appealing smile, and a laugh like peals of bells._

_Asteria, at forty, had a more mature appearance and showed the effects of her outdoor profession even more strongly than Daryl, but she’d permitted Daryl to dress her dark curls to advantage with amber beads and stuff her into a gown the color of harvest fields, and many an eye lit on the pair of them and caught there, fascinated. Jidoorians were often stuffy and conservative, or so went the thinking in Figaro, but they were also rich and jaded and always in desperate search of novelty._

_Two foreign female airskiff captains were like an exotic wine vintage to them, or a heretofore unknown flower. The two women found plenty of people eager to contribute something toward the development of a new, bigger but faster, more durable type of airskiff - “Air_ ship _”, Daryl had to correct, smiling, more than once - if it meant a chance for conversation with the hot new thing in town._

_They weren’t the only hot ticket, though. When they took their seats in the Ruyik’s opera box, young Indiro seized Daryl’s arm to point excitedly across the theater to an even higher box. “The Wandering Gambler!” he blurted. “I hope we get a chance to speak with him tonight!”_

_Gambler, eh? Daryl’s interest was piqued - she was fond of a wager or two herself. She raised the glasses the Ruyiks had lent her. The man in the high box was about her age, perhaps a bit younger. He was shockingly pale, even for Jidoor, where ladies and gentlemen alike protected themselves from the sun with almost religious devotion. A pair of jagged pink scars slashed his face, one on his chin and one on his right cheek, and he wore fashionable plum lipstick. His coat was an extravagance of ocean blue, lined with green and gold, and with sleeves slashed to show black-and-white striped undersleeves. His trousers were patterned bottle green, and his shining boots high and black. It was a remarkably stylish assemblage, the most daring look she’d seen that whole evening, and he pulled it off perfectly._

_She almost salivated. She wanted to go to him at once and ask, “Who’s your tailor? Where’d you get the coat? Who did the embroidery, and how do I get in touch with them?”_

_“Who is he?” she asked instead._

_“Oh, he’s the most exciting person! He roves about from city to city, even to the Empire, and fights duels and has love affairs and wins the most outlandish wagers!” Indiro stopped and looked embarrassed. “I’ve never heard his name, though,” he admitted. “People always call him the Gambler.”_

_“Hm. Perhaps we can learn it later.”_

The wind flew in her hair, tangling it, but she couldn’t ever bring herself to care. Mountains, lakes, rivers, grasslands, ocean unrolled underneath her, like a beautifully painted map unfurling across a vast table. The deck vibrated under her feet with the steady thrum of the engines and the whirling of the rotors. Ropes creaked, the wind made a keening noise as it split like a knife around the ship. Even the faintly sulfurous smell of the gasbag, which made the guests on Setzer’s _Blackjack_ curl their lips and hurry below to the casino, only made her smile. That, to her, was the smell of home. 

Through the speaking tube, she heard Setzer laughing with pure joy and exhilaration. “Ah, there is nothing like flying!” he cried.

She looked over her shoulder. The _Blackjack’s_ prow was barely even with the _Falcon’s_ stern. “What are you doing,” she asked into her own speaking tube, “lagging like that? Aren’t you even going to try and pass me?” It was hopeless for him, she knew. The _Blackjack’s_ double engines were more powerful individually, and its ship and balloon were smaller and therefore technically sleeker, but the _Falcon_ had six engines going, fourteen rotors to the _Blackjack’s_ ten, and was built for lightness. Everything aboard was stripped down and streamlined, while Setzer carried a full casino in his ship’s belly, with guests and their rooms and the amenities for them, and near twice as many crew.

It was his way of agreeing to her request, to propose this race. But since she had accepted the bet, she wanted to earn the victory. “Come on! Or are you too entranced watching my lovely rear?” She jiggled the rudder fins a little, causing the _Falcon_ to shiver provocatively.

“Listen, you!” he shouted, half-laughing, but the _Blackjack_ put on a burst of speed and began to catch up.

They went playing about for almost an hour more, the twin masters of the sky, in their private estate above the world. No one else had ships this good, this fast, that went as high. The airskiffs of private owners and merchants could never make it; the military powers of the world cried into their tea and coffee that they did not have such ships themselves. Balloonists could reach this elevation, but they were at the mercy of the wind, not masters of the sky but supplicants.

No, in all the world, there were only two people who knew this fierce and expanding joy, this great sense of vast dominion. Emperor Gestahl might dream he had something like it, but he was tethered to the earth by the hungry machine of his empire, its gears oiled by blood. Only in the sky was there this kind of real freedom.

Finally, Setzer dropped back. The _Blackjack_ seemed like a runner at the end of a marathon, thrilled but spent, gasping for breath. “You win!” he cried to her. “Go ahead.”

She laughed, feeling clean and pure. The wind always seemed to strip everything away, leaving her naked and exposed, reduced to her truest self. “This is it. This time’s for real. I’m gonna break every record. I’ll fly past the clouds and become known as the woman who saw the stars closer than anyone ever has before!”

“Be back by sunset!” he said, and there was a strange note to his voice, distorted by the speaking tube and distance. “I’ll be waiting for you on our hill!”

He dropped away, and Daryl smiled over her shoulder at him and his ship. The noonday sun glinted on the gold rim and black sheathing of the _Blackjack’s_ balloon, as gaudy as its captain. It grew smaller and smaller until it resembled the toy balloons of her childhood, and finally vanished from sight.

“Asteria!” she shouted into the tube. “Assemble crew! Merada, assist me in a semi-halt.”

She put the _Falcon_ into a slow glide, as close to a hover as could be managed, while the crew gathered below deck. The ship shivered like a highstrung racehorse or hound, not done yet, eager to get going again. She patted the wheel. “Soon, dear,” she whispered. “Let’s go see the stars together.”

Asteria’s calm, steady voice spoke. “All ready, Captain.”

“Merada’s there?”

“Yes.”

“Alright, one sec.”

She left the wheel and jogged across the deck to the hatch. She took the stairs two at a time below deck. Her crew of seven looked alternately placid, confident, nervous, and glum, as their individual personalities dictated. 

“Do I need to make a speech here?” she asked. “I don’t think so. You all know what we’re about. Either we manage it today, or we go back to Figaro, refit, and try again.”

“And again and again… We’ll never do it,” sighed Hitchens, but they all ignored him. Dour predictions of failure were his second greatest hobby, directly after mentioning how he intended to retire and leave the aeronautical life behind. He’d sailed with her for five years now, and never varied his tune.

“Go tend your things,” she said. “Check everything twice, or five times if you can. But I want us ready and reassembled here inside two hours.”

“Aye, ma’am!” they shouted and she nodded in dismissal. Hitchens went back to his kitchen, to make sure it was secure. Merada and Drew, their faces and clothes smudged with greasy black, returned to the throbbing engine room. The carpenter, Raffe, carried his toolbox in one gloved hand and went to the hull, tapping and peering at apparently random spots, frowning to himself with concentration.

Dorothe and Moneo, the riggers, went above deck with Asteria and Daryl. Moneo darted from rope to rope, checking for weakness, fraying, or poorly tied knots, while Dorothe shimmied up to the balloon and entered the structure. Moneo soon followed her. Their job of tending the gas cells in the balloon was perhaps the trickiest work of all the crew, but Dorothe was a genius at such things, and Moneo was a hard and eager worker.

Daryl and Asteria went over the instruments, checking everything behaved as expected. They’d gone over everything last night, too, and this morning, but it was better to be safe than sorry. When they finished that, they examined the wheel, the rotors, the fins. Everything seemed in order. Daryl spent her last six minutes entering the day’s events thus far in the log. She included her wish that, if she should succumb to ill fate today, that the _Falcon_ be given into the mastery of Setzer, the Wandering Gambler. She wasn’t entirely sure the Royal Society would obey the request. Engineers liked things to be logical, for A to follow on from B, and Setzer was as wild and apparently illogical as they came, bucking all society’s restrictions and living exactly as he pleased. But gamblers were logical, too. They had to know the odds, so A following from B suited them just as well as it did engineers. They were just prepared to accept the notion that sometimes, very occasionally, A would lead to L instead.

She grinned suddenly at a private vision of what would happen if the Society tried to appoint a different captain. Setzer would swoop in and steal the _Falcon_ in some ridiculous, showy manner, she was sure. He was a man who kept his promises.

Preparations complete, they regathered. Again, Daryl made no speech. No one here needed one.

The exhilarating bit came next - but not everyone would participate. Fatal experience had taught the Society the dangers of swift altitude changes. The worst effects could be held at bay by constant ingestion of restoratives, but stocking enough for all eight of the crew, for both ascent and descent, wasn’t cost efficient. Cheaper, instead, to simply petrify the excess crew members for the test’s duration.

As statues, their bodies would suffer no symptoms from the changes in elevation. Stone ought to be heavier than flesh, but petrification didn’t work that way. Everything weighed the same, spelled-stone or not. The only side effect was a lingering feeling of stiffness in the limbs, and as this was more bearable than the altitude sickness symptoms, everyone acquiesced without complaint.

Much complaint.

“Ah, this’ll be the time we never wake again,” said Hitchens gloomily, holding out his hand so Asteria could prick his finger with an ancient Stone Knife.

“We’ve plenty of Gold Needles,” Daryl reminded him, fastening one carefully to Drew’s granite arm. A Society engineer had replaced the usual ornate cap of the slender metal spike with a time bomb the size of Daryl’s pinky nail. After six hours, the scraping of explosive powder inside would go off, driving the needle past the stone skin and restoring the crew to their right selves, in case Daryl, Asteria, or Merada weren’t in shape to do it themselves.

“Buck up, Hitchens,” added Asteria. “I can’t jab you ‘til you say so.”

Hitchens sighed deeply, sinking his stubbled chin down to rest against his chest. “Do your worst then.”

Asteria wasted no time. The Stone Knife, hewn of something that looked like obsidian but wasn’t, made a swift dart down. There was no time for blood to well from the wound. The cook’s body turned at once to dark grey slate.

“Last.” Asteria turned to Moneo, who fidgeted in his seat, fiddling with the leather straps that held him secure.

“Sure there’s no need for me to help? I’d love to see the sky up there.”

At nineteen, Moneo was the baby of the crew, though since he’d been at sea aboard Zozoan pirate ships since age ten, he was as seasoned a sailor as any. He was always keen to prove his new leaf well turned over.

“Keep working as hard as you do,” Daryl said, “and you’ll make a good option for captain when the next airships take shape. You can visit the stars then.”

His brown, triangular face lit up at the praise. “Roger that, ma’am.” He held out his hand. “Ready.”

The crew settled, Merada took her bag of high potions and disappeared down the hatch to the engine room. Daryl and Asteria went up. Daryl loosened the laces on her own bag, making sure it was easy to reach in and pull out a gumball-like restorative. Each one cost roughly three hundred gil; there were thousands of gils’ worth in the bag. The plan was for Daryl to pilot, for Asteria to record their instrument readings, and for Merada to work the engines. They would continue their ascent until they agreed to stop, or until one of them became too ill to go on.

Daryl set her hands on the wheel. She knew it was nonsense, but it seemed to her that she could feel the whole ship through it. The balloon, with its thin aluminum cladding and its gas-filled cells inside; the ropes and thin flexible poles that bound bag and ship together; the beryllium railings and ladders; the copper straps along the oak ribs and planks and beams that fit together without nails; the whirring aluminum rotors and the fins that swung like a fish’s flukes.

The superstition that ships had souls, held as a self-evident truth by every sailor on the sea, was unfashionable in the modern and practical-minded Society. Daryl herself had been up on any number of balloons and airskiffs, and she’d grant that they had personalities, but that was as far as she’d been prepared to go. Until she’d boarded the _Falcon_ , that was. If any vessel ever extant had a soul of its own, it was this one.


	2. Everything That Rises

_Market day in Kohlingen meant race day. Daryl ran down from the big house on the hill, hands clenched tight around a gil or two, while her aunts huffed and puffed after her, calling vainly after her to, “Wait, Daryl! I said_ wait! _”_

_The races were held on a bare patch of ground outside town. It gradually filled up with people throughout the morning as they finished their business at market. Around noon, the dog races began. Their owners held them on short leashes, talking amongst themselves, making wagers, while the dogs trembled and strained against their collars, panting eagerly._

_Like all the children, Daryl prided herself on her good judgement with animals. She looked over the dogs with a discerning eye. Which of them were the most eager? Which seemed healthiest? Once she’d made her decision, she wiggled her way through the crowd around Vemmus, the kindly-faced bookie who allowed small bets from the children, and put down her precious gil._

_She joined the other children at the course’s halfway point - the gate and finish line were too crowded by adult spectators to afford a good view. There was a half-rotten fence down at that end, and they sat and swung upon it, the boys in short trousers and thick woolen stockings, the girls in bright and heavily embroidered wool skirts. Daryl liked to sit herself between two girls and pretend their skirts were hers._

_The first race began - Daryl’s dog wasn’t in it. Instead, she cheered for a brown and white speckled bitch she’d bet on at other times. The dog came in fourth, and Daryl nodded with satisfaction. She hadn’t thought her a winner today._

_Daryl’s dog, a lanky, hollow-sided, yellow-haired thing with nervous eyes, won the third heat. Daryl returned to the bookie in good spirits, collected her small winnings, and put them down again on the yellow dog to place in the final._

_By this point, the racehorses were beginning to gather. Daryl ignored the last heats of the dog races and went to investigate. She walked past the giant plow horses with their shaggy manes and hooves the size of serving platters - they raced last, pulling heavily-laden sleds. They contested strength, not speed, which bored Daryl. Their owners, stock farmers almost as big and shaggy as their beasts, would not say the same. They stood tense guard over their animals and sleds, lest an opponent attempt sabotage._

_Daryl was more interested in the long-legged, molten-eyed racehorses of the gentlemen farmers. These families, whose money came as much from their inheritance and their tenants’ rent as from the produce of their farms, had the leisure and disposable gil to breed or purchase animals purely for their swiftness._

_What beauties they were! Soft, champing mouths. Long legs, the veins prominent through the velvety skin. Smooth, strong necks, tossing proudly. Backs as high as treetops to a child’s eyes. Daryl drank in the sight worshipfully. And almost as much, the sight of the jockeys who rode them, young men and a scattering of bold young women. Some were children of the gentlemen, and rode for fun and glory. Some were farmers’ brats whose slight sizes and knowledgeable way with animals got them the job for a small wage and a sliver of any winnings._

_Daryl dreamed of joining them as soon as she was big enough. Her aunts were sure to fuss and cluck, but she was sure she could persuade them. Aunts Leonora and Bevera thought of themselves as good housekeepers, and despaired of Daryl’s indoor habits. She stuck her nose into their embroidery baskets and helped herself to whatever thread and ribbon took her fancy. She dismantled toy mechanical models in front of the fireplace, leaving smears of grease on the hardwood floor and the nearby furniture. She read books for adults and wrote her thoughts down with and on whatever was at hand, resulting in chalk marks and ink stains on the wallpaper, on tables, receipt books, envelopes, and the clothes of others. (But never her own - she was fastidious about her own clothing.) Therefore, her aunts liked any hobby of hers that took her out of the house, so she could make messes where they didn’t have to clean them._

_“Out of the way,” a jockey said to her, his arms full of saddle and bridle. She moved obligingly, though he rushed past so abruptly that he still managed to bonk her in the head with a swinging wooden stirrup. She rubbed at the impact site but didn’t let it bother her. Which horse, which horse… She decided on a tall chestnut mare with three white stockings and ran back just in time to watch the final dog race. Her yellow dog came third, meaning her bet to place was no good._

_Rats. She kicked at the black dirt. Now she had no gil to bet on the horses._

In order to stay aloft, the _Falcon_ had to maintain a certain amount of forward movement. Grey streamers of cloud whirled by Daryl as they rose. The rushing air bit at the inside of her mouth and her throat, and came back out as a dragon-breath plume. It turned to ice crystals that clung to the muffler pulled up around her face.

With nothing to see but grey fog, her eyes traced a steady pattern along the instruments, checking the readings of chronometer, altimeter, barometer, and thermometer. It was not her job to note them down, but she needed to know what they were to pilot safely. Her hand rose and she bit down on another high potion, crunching it between her teeth. The sweetness of honey spread across her tongue and she swallowed. It lit up her throat with a fire like raw ginger.

She remembered swallowing potions as a child, sick with fever or bruised after falling from a horse or a tree or a rafter, or after being gouged by a hawk. Her father was an apothecary, and she drank the raw mixture before it was solidified for longer keeping and ease of transportation. The taste of those potions was different from any she’d had since leaving Kohlingen. Dark and oily, sweetened with treacle instead of honey or Jidoorian ambrosia.

The grey clouds wobbled around her and reformed into the grey stone blocks of her father’s house. _No_ , she thought, _the walls were brown, weren’t they..?_ , but the walls did not change. Her father loomed before her in the mist, his tired eyes above his drooping mustache, his soft liniment-smelling hands.

 _“You are an unnatural being,”_ he said, so tired of her. _“Decide which.”_

Her gloved hands clenched on the wheel. She bit down hard, crushing another chunk of potion, and let its strange taste drive the vision away. Chronometer, altimeter, barometer, thermometer. Doing well. The _Falcon_ soared higher and at last they burst through the clouds.

She inhaled with sudden joy, her head spinning. All around was indigo sky, the sun in fiery glory in the west. The thin, cold air tasted like sweet wine. “Here we go!” she called, though it came out at half volume.

The air was familiar, like she’d tasted it before.

It was like the night after she and Setzer had found the Sea Queen’s tomb. They’d explored its damp and dripping passages, finding chests filled with ancient treasures, and they’d gone back to their hill afterward, laid down on the short grass and made love as the stars rose. It had been a chilly night, and a wind had come up. They’d had their coats, but no blankets. Setzer had shivered and wrapped both coats around himself, but Daryl had stood, facing into the wind, letting it dry her sweating body. It had caressed her like a lover itself, making every tired muscle sing with the glee of being alive, being bold, being free.

It was the same air up here and she drank it down as happily. Setzer’s voice murmured in her ear, like he’d come to stand beside and appreciate the wind with her. _“None but you, love, could enjoy this sort of weather.”_

She smiled behind her muffler, shivering inside her coat. Her hand rose with another potion in it. Her eyes darted down, checked. Chronometer, altimeter, barometer, thermometer. Getting close, but not there yet. She’d beat their old record if it killed her.

She looked over her shoulder. Asteria’s dark eyes were invisible, so small was the slit left open between her hat and muffler, but she nodded to indicate she’d seen Daryl. “All good. Keep going.”

Daryl leaned close to the speaking tube. “Merada?”

There was a long, quiet moment, then Merada’s answer. “Keep on.”

Up they went, up and up. Pressure pounded in Daryl’s ears. She yawned to clear them, but she could feel a migraine building, like clouds piling against mountains, held at bay only by the potions she kept swallowing. The blueness of the sky grew darker and darker. Her body was so wracked by chills that she leaned on the wheel for support. Her sight seemed to be growing fuzzy. She took a potion and peered at the instruments before her. Chronometer. Altimeter. Barometer. Thermometer. Tick, tick, tick. Their little dials, with hands going up, up, up, or down, down, down. Closer and closer, higher and higher.

There.

Under the edge of the balloon, just visible in the midnight-blue sky, a star, sparkling cold and white. It came closer to her like a beautiful woman descending a staircase, a beautiful woman in a silver gown. _Maria…!_

She wore a tall crown of silver and diamonds, diamonds dripped from her ears and down her throat. The silver gown clung to her body like water, shifting, concealing, and revealing. She smiled at Daryl, so gently, and her teeth were like pearls made of ice, her skin glittered with rime, her blowing hair was spun from frost…

Maria began to sing, high clear falling notes, words that Daryl couldn’t make out but which formed themselves into something understandable anyway.

_“My love, a world apart from me…_

_You need not chase vainglory,_

_The glitter of golden riches,_

_The glitter of a phoenix’s feathers._

_Come home, rest upon my breast…_

_Call me your shelter, and I shall_

_Call myself content…”_

Daryl had read them in a libretto, years ago. She remembered. The first performance she saw at the Jidoor opera house, and Maria in a seafoam dress. She’d been in the chorus then, a nereid holding a sword, not a soloist yet. She hadn’t been the one to sing the words. It hadn’t been her, it was Daryl’s mind making things up to fit a hallucination.

She dragged her eyes down, made her reading. Chronometer. Altimeter. Barometer. Thermometer. There was frost on the metal casings of each instrument.

She couldn’t feel the _Falcon_ through the wheel, not like she normally could. Her hands were numb. Her heart pounded, her breath whistled in her chest. But they’d only seen one star. If only she could raise her head and look up! If only the balloon were made of glass so she could see!

“Keep going?” she mumbled. The fragments of the potion tumbled around in her mouth. She barely heard her own voice. Who was she asking the question of? Herself? Asteria? The _Falcon_?

There was no answer. She kept going up.

Asteria’s hand landed on her shoulder. Daryl flinched. Her eyes went to the instruments automatically, chronometer, altimeter, barometer, thermometer, before she managed to turn and look at her second-in-command.

“Finished,” Asteria croaked. “Finish.”

Daryl nodded. Her neck protested the movement. Her hand dipped and rose, she crunched down another potion. She leaned toward the speaking tube, and the deck swayed under her as though the planks were made of gum instead of oak. “Merada. Down.”

Silence. “Roger.”

Daryl reversed the rotors and the _Falcon_ began descending. “Take the wheel,” she mumbled. The words came out of her mouth like party-goers leaving a nice warm hall well past midnight, only to be abruptly confronted by the dark desert chill of Figaro at night. They piled up in the doorway, reluctant. Asteria reached past her and took hold of a spoke. Daryl backed away, hearing ice crack as she moved. Thin sheets of it slid off her coat as she stumbled her way to the rail.

She looked down. Drifts of clouds like rolls of dirty cotton swirled over the wrinkled green and brown rind of the world, over the vast and glimmering blue ocean. She squinted and drew her spyglass from her pocket with fumbling hands. Was that…?

At the limit of her sight, the horizon made a sharp line. Not a line. The horizon turned sharply on itself, made itself an angle.

A smile tugged at the edge of Daryl’s mouth, pulled so hard it became a grin. Proof!

“Asteria!” she shouted, then realized the wheel shouldn’t be left alone. And that Asteria probably couldn’t hear her. She stumbled back and pressed the spyglass into Asteria’s hand. “Go. Look. Nor’west. Whad’ya see?”

Asteria, obedient, went and looked. Daryl had another potion. Her second-in-command came back. She didn’t jump for joy, but her voice sounded like she wanted to, if only she had the energy. “A corner!”

“Ha!” Daryl barked, and the laugh tore her tired throat like a knife. “It’s a corner! The world _is_ square!”

“I know a few S’ciety members…” Asteria’s voice faded, but Daryl could finish the thought. The Society would be ecstatic to receive the news, to have an eyewitness account of a cherished theory. The world was square.

They went down. A few more visions troubled Daryl, but she blinked them away. Warmth seeped back into her grateful body, and the air no longer hurt her. When they again reached cruising height, she called down to Merada to help her with the semi-halt. Her mind felt as soft and spongy as pudding, and she double-checked each move she made. What an end it would be, if she spoilt their triumphant flight by steering them into a storm or a mountain range.

When she went below deck, Asteria had already restored the rest of the crew. Daryl stopped on the steps, watching. Moneo was eagerly asking what the flight had been like. Dorothe was stretching out her stiff limbs. Drew stood over Hitchens, badgering him to hurry and get the galley reopened, he wanted to take tea to Merada. Raffe, rubbing his brown eyes like someone waking from a nap, put a quelling hand on Drew’s shoulder and drew him back so Hitchens could stand.

A great wave of love crashed over her. Like some sloppy, affectionate drunk, she wanted to fling her arms around each of them and tell them how happy they made her, how today never would’ve happened without them.

“Success!” she called, and they all turned toward her, their faces stretching into triumphant grins. “I’ve got to log it,” she said, enunciating each word with care, “and then I need a lie-down. Drew, go make sure Merada rests. Asteria, you’re off-duty. Dorothe, you’re in command. Set a course for my hill, and give Moneo something to do so he doesn’t explode.”

A gentle burst of laughter from them all. “I won’t!” Moneo insisted.

Drew poked him in the side and said something teasing. Dorothe ruffled his untidy hair. “Go up and check the bag,” she ordered, then nodded to Daryl and Asteria. “I’ve got this. Go rest.”

Asteria didn’t bother with anything fancy, just sagged down onto the sofa and closed her eyes. As Daryl approached, she held out her notebook, with all the measurements recorded. Daryl took it with a word of thanks and went to her cabin.

It was the only private room aboard the _Falcon_ , if you didn’t count the head. Or the galley, which Hitchens ruled over as a petty tyrant and let others enter only under his supervision. The crew slept and ate together in the main room, with hammocks hooked to the ceiling and tables that folded into the walls. Daryl had her own bed, though it was flimsy and lightweight, more a cot than anything. She, Maria, and Setzer all agreed that the big, comfortable fourposter in the _Blackjack’s_ cabin was better suited for all purposes, including sleep.

But the thin bed wouldn’t keep her from sleeping well tonight, she thought muzzily. Her handwriting as she recorded their feat was spiderish. I’ll rewrite it neater later, she told herself. She couldn’t seem to keep her eyes open...

_She gambled her way to Narshe. The farmers at the stolid timber inns on the way were sympathetic to a broken-hearted lad fleeing his home; they bought her ale and allowed her a seat at their card games. She watched quietly, observing each man’s habits, then asked to play a hand or two. She made small winnings, enough to pay for dinner and bed, then pretended to be headachy and sleepy and made her excuses. One or two, avuncular, offered to hire her as a groom or farmhand, if she was in need of a new place in the world, but she turned them down._

_In Narshe, she bought new clothes. Winter clothes for herself ‘and her sister’, she told the shopkeep. She picked practical garments with only a little geometric embroidery at the hems of the tunics and around the bottom of the sweeping woolen skirt. She covered their dullness with an extravagant fur-lined coat, spending most of her money on it. The coal miners in the pub were reluctant to let a young woman gamble with them, but she found a party of Figaroan merchants deep in their cups who let her into their game. They were so drunk, she barely had to try to win against them, but they were not displeased to lose to her. One offered to pay her with his body, sloppy-mouthed and cheerful, wiggling his eyebrows as though he were making a joke of it, but his eyes were dark and hot._

_He was not terribly older than her, with black curls and a neat black mustache he was clearly proud of, but she couldn’t run the risk. She told him that if he’d been driven that low on funds, it was time for the game to end. She took her gil and rented a private room, where she had her dinner brought to her. She was hungry all the time, it seemed, her body desperately trying to regain lost weight. She ate a whole capon and flung the bones against the wall, pretending she was throwing them in her aunts’ and father’s faces. She stood and twirled in her skirt, watching it swing around her legs, and a vicious, happy spite made her laugh aloud._

_She sold the coat at the foot of the mountains. She wouldn’t need it in Figaro, and the further from the snowy peaks it went, the less valuable it became. She bought new clothes with the money from the sale, slightly finer than those she’d bought in Narshe. A skirt again, because she could wear one openly now, though Figaroan women wore trousers or tights as often or more often than they wore skirts. She picked out a green short jacket with bands of swirling yellow embroidery at the collar and cuffs, and together with her close-fitting black blouse and the new green cotton skirt, cut a very dandy figure._

_She used the money she’d won on her way down the mountain to pay for a seat on a caravan through the desert. There were no Zozoan bandits here, but the desert still might prove fatal to unwary travelers. Dangerous ambush predators lurked in the sand, water was not easy to find, and the winds rushing down from the mountainsides kicked up frequent sandstorms._

_They were headed to South Figaro, not for Figaro Castle. The odds of finding it without a guide directly from the castle were too poor to bother with. Daryl kept her eyes peeled for a churning in the sand nonetheless, or towers wavering in the heat haze that danced at the horizons. To see the moving Illusory Castle with her own eyes would be a dream come true. What a marvel of engineering it must be._

_She was disappointed to cross the desert with no sign of it, but as they approached South Figaro, she saw something to make up for the lack. Balloons! Bright and high, they glimmered golden in the late afternoon light, like glass ornaments against the sky. She drew in a deep breath, seeing them, seeing them overlay the toy balloon of her childhood, the sketches and diagrams in the worn pages of the aeronautical journals she’d obsessed over. And then, rising up above the walls of the city, above the blue roofs, she saw it. An airskiff. A bronze-colored balloon, above a narrow galley-style ship, two rotors and a fin at the back instead of oars. It pierced through the sky like a needle. Not as high as the balloons, but faster, speeding away and out of sight._

_She stood from the wagon bench to watch it go, her heart hammering in her chest, her mouth almost watering with greed. To ride one of those, to captain one of those, to taste the high, clear wind that blew up there. To be free!_

Someone shook her shoulder. “Captain! Captain!”

Daryl blinked bleary eyes. Her head felt stuffed with sand, her face felt full of fluid. She looked automatically to check the instruments, chronometer, altimeter, barometer, thermometer, but they were not there. She’d fallen asleep at her desk, her pen still in hand. Ink had dripped and blotched on the log.

It was Moneo at her shoulder. His triangle face was anxious. “Dorothe asks you to come at once.”

She stood, wobbling on her feet. She was so tired. What time was it? The window was no darker than when she’d come in. A look at her pocketwatch told her she’d slept no more than twenty minutes, and as they went through the main room, she saw Asteria still collapsed in the same position on the sofa, snoring.

Raffe was on deck, at the wheel, but Moneo led her to the stern and the climbing pole there. He clambered up with the ease of a boy who’d spent half his life in the rigging, and she followed, her hands feeling clumsy and slow.

They entered the bag through an aluminum hatch, into the creaking, billowing interior structure of the balloon. Her eyes watered at the sudden increase of the sulfurous scent of the gas. The gas itself had no smell. Agents were added to give it the odor, so that leaks could be detected more easily.

Dorothe was on an upper catwalk, kneeling by one of the long, pale, sausage-shaped gas cells. She was measuring its dimensions, and her face was grim.

“Dorothe?”

The rigger looked down at them, the catwalk struts cutting her face into irregular sections. “It’s not good, ma’am. The cells are stretched, there’s gas escaping. Vents got blocked by ice, looks like, couldn’t let out excess.” She reached her hand out, tapped the skeletal frame that supported the balloon’s armored skin. Daryl saw the slender aluminum rods were slightly warped. “The cells stretching damaged the structure, too, not a lot, but in many places. It’s not a right-away problem, I don’t think, but we don’t have supplies to repair more than a bit of it, and it’ll probably get worse with every move we make.”

“So we’ve got to get back to port smartly,” Daryl said.

Dorothe nodded.

A vicious choice. They’d come a long way out so they could look for the horizon, but if the _Falcon_ were healthy, it would be a short trip back to society. With gas escaping, though, they would lose altitude as they went. They might not make it safely over the mountains if they used the shortest route and cut overland to South Figaro, and if they crashed in the snow-capped peaks, their odds of survival were slim. And if they did survive, the nearest settlement was Zozo, and therefore no salvation at all.

The longer route, to stay over sea until they reached Jidoor, was slightly more plausible. They could land near the garden city and have repair parts shipped from Figaro. Or, if so much gas escaped on the way that the ship became unable to stay aloft, well, the _Falcon_ had been constructed seaworthy for just such a dire extremity. They would make a water landing and cut the balloon loose. But they had no mast, no sails. The _Falcon_ was too big to row. They would sit in their vessel with their supplies dwindling, praying for a friendly current and a passing ship.

_Damn. Damn, and frozen hell, and damnation._

_Daryl woke with a start, twitching awake from some miserable, shivering dream. A dull red throbbing pain went through her body, centered in her left arm, and she bit her lip to keep from crying out. She would not give anyone the satisfaction of knowing that she hurt._

_It was cold, but there was a roof overhead, not stars or branches. A beautiful roof, red velvet, shining in the moonlight. No, not a roof. The canopy of a bed. Maria’s bed, the luxurious furnishings in the rooms of a Jidoorian Opera soloist. So why was Daryl cold, enough that her dream had shifted to a nightmare of white snow and black rock and black skeletons of trees, black frozen water, the black scorched bones of an airskiff, the black contorted bodies of her crew on the ground -_

_She shook herself, and looked around._

_There was a large bundle next to her in the bed._

_She reached her good arm over and tugged at it, trying to get one of the ends loose. Jidoor was pleasant even in winter, so she was not as cold as her dream had made her, but a blanket - would - be - nice. She grunted, pulling, and trying not to jostle her healing arm._

_There was a sleepy mumble and a mussed head popped out of the bundle, blinking at her. Sapphire eyes widened and the bundle thrashed apart, as Maria clawed her way out of it and rearranged the blankets around Daryl all in one swift wave of movement, moving Daryl’s burnt-but-healed arm gently above the covers._

_“Oh, Daryl, I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean - here you go, have them - I didn’t mean to steal them all.”_

_Daryl sighed happily, as much to have Maria fussing over her as to have the blankets warming her. “You’ve always been a wretched cover hog, songbird.”_

_Even Maria’s pouts were pretty. There was nothing coquettish and false to them, though she could muster that sort if needed. It was simply that the arrangement of her features was perfect beyond belief, and no matter what expression she shifted them into, she looked like the handiwork of a master artisan, the greatest painter or sculptor of all time, but better, because she lived and breathed._

_“I truly did not mean to,” Maria said again. Her nightdress whispered about her as she fetched a goblet for Daryl. Daryl took an obliging sip, then made a face._

_“Water. Can’t I have just one small drop of wine?”_

_“You’ll drink water until you are properly healed.” She frowned down at Daryl. “And you know it very well. Don’t play games.”_

_Alcohol slowed the effects of restoratives. Daryl’s father had told her so once, as she leaned against his knee in his workshop, on a rare occasion he’d let her in there, the dim-lit room full of green and acrid scents. Maria too, had learned the lesson young, as her parents nodded off in a Jidoor back alley, lying in their own piss, wine bottles held in slack fingers, the potions her aunt had crushed and trickled down their throats wasted._

_It was a point of commonality between the two of them, the stories of their busybody aunts whom they had both resented and loved, and the parents who gave them infrequent drops of attention in between their time-consuming occupations of gathering herbs, blending restoratives, and selling the products (Daryl), and panhandling for enough gil to drink themselves to death (Maria). Those guardian figures had all betrayed them. Daryl’s aunts had starved and beaten her for the effrontery of wearing a maid’s borrowed skirt and stays; Maria’s aunt had sold her to the opera chorus for no reason except Maria’s pretty face and her aunt’s need for gil. Maria’s parents had abandoned her to chase the bottom of wine barrels, and Daryl’s father had disowned her for being honest about who she was._

_The thought made Daryl clench her teeth, feeling a red wave of anger at the world’s injustice rushing through her. Her burns throbbed with it. The worst had been healed, but the greater the time between the injury and the cure, the less effective restoratives were. She’d spent a week alone in the Nikeah Mountains after the crash, melting snow to drink and eating juniper berries and pine nuts while her burns festered and ran with pus. She tossed her head restlessly on the pillow, looking away from Maria, out the window to the thin clouds and the white face of the moon._

_Maria smoothed a hand across Daryl’s hair, as though she guessed her thoughts. “Should I call for a sleeping draught?”_

_Daryl used her good arm and caught the hand, nuzzling into it. The slender fingers and soft palm were still flushed from sleep. “Sing for me?” she asked. “A song about someplace good and warm, if you please.”_

She wouldn’t risk the mountains, she decided. The Greater Soron Current ran down the coastline, carrying Kohlingen whalers, swift Jidoorish clippers, steam-powered Figaroan packet ships, and far-roaming Nikean merchantmen. Plenty of friendly ships around to find them, should they go down. There was a risk of encountering Zozoan pirates, though they mainly worked the Inner Sea, or an Imperial privateer - but the _Falcon_ had Figaro colors to fly, if necessary, and a charter of scientific exploration from the Royal Society. The worst the Imperials would do would be to ransom them.

She was taking too long to reply. Both her riggers were staring at her, and Moneo had his hands half-raised, as though preparing to catch her, should she faint. She grinned at them, made it hearty and reassuring. “Alright, Dorothe, you’re relieved of command. Stay up here and keep your eyes on things. Shout down if anything looks like it’s about to pop. Moneo, with me.”

She scrambled back down the ladder, and was halfway across the deck to give Raffe their new heading when she heard shouts from below.

It was a shout no one wanted to hear, but aeronauts least of all.

“Fire! Fire!”

She pounded down the stairs from the deck to the main room. Asteria was standing over the hatch to the engine room, shouting the alarm. The hatchway behind her was shut fast.

Daryl raced over and kicked staccato at it, like a frantic neighbor pounding on the door. “Report! Merada!”

More talkative and less weary than his chief, Drew answered instead. His shout came muffled through the hatch. “Must’ve started while I was above, Captain! Some oil leaked, spurted onto something hot! Don’t fear, we’ve got it handled!”

“Open up!” Daryl commanded. “Let us all in to fight.”

“Not on your life,” said Merada, sounding tough and tired.

Drew added, “Can’t open up, ‘less we wanna feed it a whole rush of air! Nah, ma’am, the two of us’ll tackle it!”

Daryl’s hands clenched. She couldn’t argue with that. She knew they had the right of it. If it should make its way elsewhere in the ship… The worst would be if it made it to the gas cells in the balloon. They would go up like niter powder.

_The black ribs of an airskiff withered against a cold white backdrop, her ears bled, her arm burned..._

No. Then it had been too sudden, there had been nothing to do but drop burning from the sky. Not this time. She turned to Asteria. Her second-in-command looked as puffy and ill-used as Daryl felt. “Prepare to abandon ship. Get food, water, parachutes, maps, the raft, but don’t give up yet. Get Dorothe out of the balloon.”

Asteria marched away, hauling Moneo with her, already shouting orders. Daryl wracked her fogged mind for what aid she could give her engineers. They had water down there already, and foam bombs to smother the flames… Engine rooms were bad places for fires. Too much fuel, too much heat, too many nooks and crannies.

She had a losing hand, today, though it had started well.

_Setzer, leaving an inn, weaving like a drunk. But he was not drunk, he only could not see because of the blood sheeting down his face. She ran to him, got her shoulder under his - it wasn’t easy, they were the same height. “What the hell happened?” she gasped as the red blood poured out and soaked his silver hair, soaked her expensive violet jacket, a stain she never got out of it._

_“It’s important,” he said urbanely, as though he wasn’t bleeding all over them both, “to know when to fold your cards. If you don’t...” He gestured at his face. “This.”_

“Fire! Fire!”

In a different part of the ship.

Her head snapped up. Across the room, at the door leading to the galley, a trickle of smoke.

Two separate fires, she thought. Two, and the balloon damaged. What were the odds of that?

Hitchens burst out in a billowing black cloud, bellowing “Fire!” loud enough to burst his lungs. A bucket swung from his hand, full of foam bombs that he flung into the room behind him.

She ran across to him and saw flames bursting out from the wall behind the tap, and smoke leaking in dark grey threads between the planks around it. It wasn’t two fires, after all. There were pipes that ran between the galley and the engine room, carrying hot water. The fire must have traveled alongside them, and no one noticed because the smoke from the engine room covered the smell.

“Keep on, Hitchens,” she ordered and plunged into the room. She drew her collar across her face with one hand and advanced toward the fire. She kept her streaming gaze fixed on the brass fixture of the tap. The metal seemed to flicker - partly reflections of the fire, partly the metal softening. Her hand flashed out, grabbed the molten handle, turned it. She staggered back, clutching her burnt hand, clenching her teeth against a paincry. Steaming water gushed in a torrent from the tap. Perhaps it would help.

Raffe appeared in the doorway as Daryl drew out a high potion with her unburnt left hand. She crunched it down and the bubbled red flesh of her right palm resettled.

Raffe wound his scarf around his jaw and asked, “Where’s Drew?”

The aftermath of pain turned her voice into a hiss. “With the engines. Take those bombs over from Hitchens. Hitchens, you help me get provisions together.”

They didn’t carry much food aboard. With their speed, they were never more than a day’s journey from friendly resupply, and of course they didn’t want the weight. Daryl took down a hanging half-side of beef, spattered with foam, but that would wash off, and lugged it out the door. Hitchens staggered past with his arms full of peck bags of fruit - apples, pears, oranges, grapes, though they’d been snacked on and none of the bags were full. Next, Daryl seized a wilting bushel of greens and tins of raisins and sticky dates. There were kenning bags of dried and salted fish, a bushel sack of beans, two sacks of flour, a string of sausages, two heads of cauliflower, five sweet potatoes.

Hitchens began stuffing the loose items into waxed canvas bags. Raffe had thrown all his bombs, leaving the rear wall of the kitchen coated in pale foam. No flames or smoke could be seen in the room anymore, but Daryl could still smell it. She had the terrifying notion that if she could see the _Falcon_ from outside, she would see the fire chewing through the hull.

“Start carrying these up,” she ordered and turned toward the engine room. There was smoke rising from its hatchway now. She was only halfway across the room when there was a ‘ _woomph_ ’ and a report of shattering glass behind her.

She whipped around. “What was-?!”

Raffe reeled back from the open galley door. Blood soaked through his pulled-high blue scarf. A dagger-like shard of green glass protruded from the back of his neck. Hitchens grabbed him as he staggered. “The feckin’ wine bottles!”

The alcohol, shelved along the back wall, had boiled; the bottles had exploded.

“I’m alright,” the carpenter gasped, but flecks of blood flew out with the words.

Daryl sped back to him and popped her last high potion in his mouth. “Chew and swallow.”

He made a game effort, but he couldn’t get it down. He retched it back up, a messy wad of potion fragments, spittle, and crimson blood. Daryl stared down at the splatter of it across the wooden floor. The world seemed to wobble around her, like heat haze.

_Her father stood across from her, fingers resting on his walnut desk. A pot steamed behind him, a dropped pestle rolled across the wooden floor. Parchment skin sagged under his eyes. “Then go,” he said in a winter voice. “Rove about as suits you. But you’ll never be welcome here again._

_There is no home in the world for one such as you.”_

He was wrong, Daryl thought, with the old hate warm in her belly. She’d found herself two true lovers, and made a family out of her crew.

“Hitchens! Get him up the deck, Asteria’ll have potions still. Grind it to a powder and make him inhale it. Quick! And send Moneo down to get these supplies.”

She strode across the room and thumped her bootheel against the engine room hatch. “Merada, how’s it down there?”

Daryl could barely hear Drew’s answering shout, so faint was the voice and so loud the sounds of flames and protesting metal. “Sheer burning hell, ma’am!”

“Give up, then. Come out. We’re abandoning ship.” It was strange. For six years, she’d made the _Falcon_ her life. But the decision to leave it to its funerary pyre didn’t inspire grief or rage. It seemed simply what came next in the order of things.

She leaned low to hear the reply, feeling heat rising from the timber. She heard a faint conversation, then Drew answered. “Get everybody else off, and leave us two parachutes on deck.”

“Damn that. You’ll have no chance on your own, it’ll be a sea landing. All or none.”

“That’s just how it is, Captain. Sorry.”

Her engineers weren’t planning to escape. They intended to stay fighting, keeping hell down with sheer obstinacy, until the rest of them were safe.

“Well, damn that and you! Come out of there, or I’ll drag you out myself!”

Merada’s voice again, the harshest of whispers. “Quit wasting time, Captain. We’re working in here.”

Daryl stood silent, grinding her boot heel into the hatch. Despite her threat, she didn’t have any way to get them out - the hatch locked from the inside. And they were right that if the fire reached the engines, the rest of them might not have time to get away.

Her eyes stung. “Any requests, then?”

Merada rasped, “Give my books at home to the Society. That’s it.”

“I will.”

Drew said, “Look after Raffe for me,” and Daryl’s throat clenched.

“I will,” she promised. Shard of glass through the neck or not.


	3. Must Come Down

On the main deck, everyone had their parachute and luggage tied on except her. Moneo and Dorothe carried the food. Hitchens had Raffe’s arm slung over his shoulder.

“Get overboard!” she commanded, and grabbed for the parachute Asteria held out to her. One by one, they all swung their legs over the railing and leapt away.

Daryl’s hands did the muscle-memory work of putting on her parachute. There were flames roaring up the port side of her beautiful ship, and the gasbag was making a whining noise that scratched the inside of her skull like a scared cat.

_The_ Falcon _rose from its moorings. Her hands on the wheel and her smiling mouth trembled in sheer elation. The ropes fell away one by one. Like a baby bird taking its first test flight, the ship seemed to wobble, but it was only Daryl’s shaking hands causing it. One at a time, she wiped them down the front of her coat._

_They rose to the prescribed height. “Good!” she shouted. “We’re starting off! Merada, one-quarter speed!”_

_Below, South Figaro’s blue tile roofs gleamed in the morning sun. The people were the size of mites, but she could see from the way they eddied and halted in the streets that they were all watching the maiden flight. It might have been her imagination, but she even thought she could hear them cheering._

_She made a loop around the city. All the numbers looked good. “All fine?” she asked, and the answers came back. All fine._

_They were supposed to take the ship twice around and descend again, but Daryl’s heart rebelled. Here they were, in the air at last, free and unbound!_

_“Asteria?”_

_“Captain?”_

_“What d’you say to going a little higher?”_

_Her first mate stared at her, unreadable for a moment. Then she said, “Sounds good, Captain.”_

_“Right. Up again, Merada, until I say.”_

_Asteria had nearly been named captain over Daryl. She had more experience and she was a born Figaroan. But it had been Daryl who found the Gestahlian spy in the Society’s ranks, and she’d leveraged that to leapfrog her friend. Asteria would’ve made a fine captain. But Daryl wanted it more._

_If Asteria resented it - or rather, if she resented it unbearably, because of course the loss had been a blow - Daryl was handing her a gift-wrapped opportunity. When they returned and all the bean-counters and penny-pinchers swarmed up to shriek at Daryl about her risk-taking ways, all Asteria would have to do was say that she_ never _would do such a thing, and they’d kick Daryl off and give the airship to the one it always should have gone to._

_But her agreement, “Sounds good”, seemed sincere, and as they rose, the smile blooming on her face assured Daryl of it._

_There was sand in the air, whipped up high from the desert. Despite that, the wind tasted cleaner and fresher the higher they went and Daryl took great, gulping breaths of it. The city dwindled beneath them to a child’s toy. In the distance, in the yellow haze of sand, she saw sunlight sparkling on the towers of Figaro Castle._

_Seeing the castle was a rare delight, and Daryl decided it was a good omen. She patted the wheel. The wood was warm, and a purring vibration ran from it up Daryl’s arms. It almost seemed like the_ Falcon _was happy, too._

The ship shook suddenly and flames burst roaring out of the lower-deck hatchway. Daryl staggered and ran to the rail, swung one leg over and then the other. Her feet rested on a protruding lip of beryllium, and she saw the other crew member’s parachutes opening far below her like white flowers, like the little white flowers that bloomed in spring on her hill. She sprang into the air.

She carefully aimed her body so that she did not descend in too close a proximity to anyone - getting tangled might mean injuries or death. The flat surface of the sea grew enormous, and the wind rushed howling past her. The dangerous and heedless part of her that didn’t care about consequences came alive at moments like this, and despite everything - her dream burning to ashes above her, her friends inside it dying or dead - the pure exhilaration of risk and speed and good sweet air swept through her, cutting through the cobwebs of fear and grief and exhaustion. 

Daryl tilted herself this way and that and made a good landing, deploying her parachute at the right moment and slipping gently into the Great Sea. She resurfaced, blowing out water and shaking her head. Saltwater trickled down her face. It dripped from her bangs into her eyes and blurred her vision. Overhead, against the purpling evening sky, the Falcon blazed eastward like a comet, like an orange sword laid in the air.

The water was cold as it soaked through her layers of clothing. She unfastened the latches of her harness and left her silk parachute floating in the water, then swam in the direction of her crew. They’d managed to gather themselves together, and Asteria and Dorothe were manhandling a bulky orange cube of rubberized fabric. As Daryl approached, it popped open and grew quickly in size, until it was a long, low-hulled raft. Dorothe slid onto it, and from a wrapped parcel at its center, handed out wooden segments that interlocked like jigsaw pieces and gave the liferaft a taller hull.

One by one, the crew climbed aboard. Daryl tread water beside the craft, handing up luggage until everything and everyone was aboard. Only then did she climb in herself, with an assisting hand from Dorothe.

She surveyed her crew. Raffe lay propped against a gunwale, his chest rising and falling with whistling breaths. Hitchens had removed the glass from the carpenter’s neck and was wrapping the wound with a sour and doubtful face. Dorothe seemed unhurt, but Moneo and Asteria winced as they moved gingerly about. “What’s wrong with you?” Daryl asked.

Moneo’s ears turned beet red. Asteria cast him an exasperated, tired glance and said in a low voice to Daryl, “Bungled his chute and crashed into me.” She rolled up a sleeve and showed a scraped raw rope burn on her arm. “Burns and bruises for us most likely, but we’ll manage.” She looked at the choppy sea around them. “How about you? Are Merada and Drew…” She trailed off, seeing the look on Daryl’s face.

“They stayed aboard.” Daryl dropped her own voice low. “How many potions have you still got?”

Her second looked grim. “Five, and most of one powdered one. Raffe near choked when I tried having him inhale it. We’ll mix it with some water and see if we can dribble it down him.”

“Alright. Give it to Hitchens, let him take care of it.” The diluted potion would be less effective, but they needed to get something in him to start him healing. She glanced over at Moneo. “Doing alright, lad?”

He nodded, still flushed scarlet. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I -”

“Never mind. Let’s focus on getting to land. First thing, who’s got the mast?”

The collapsible mast was wrapped inside the sails and packed separately from the raft-cube. Asteria pointed to the set of luggage she’d carried. “I brought it down. Dorothe, get it out.”

The rigger shifted through the pile once, and then again, more slowly. She looked up, eyes grown wide with alarm. “Captain, it’s not there.”

Daryl straightened from her task of sorting and securing the rations. “It must be.”

“I had it and the raft,” Asteria added, almost angry.

Dorothe didn’t back down. She spread her hands out, illustrating the items spread around her. “No mast, ma’ams.”

“Check everything.”

They did. The raft was six yards by two and a half, too small a space for anything to remain missing when five people were searching for it. They even helped Raffe to his feet again to be sure he wasn’t lying on it. As they finished, Moneo suddenly sunk to a crouch, grinding the heels of his hands into his eyes. “It must’ve been me,” he choked out, trying hard not to cry. “I must’ve knocked it loose, hitting you, ma’am -”

The light was failing, the stars beginning to twinkle in the heathery dusk. In the sea around them, the silk parachutes were still floating, wilted white flowers rocked in the waves. “We have oars, don’t we?” Daryl asked. “And lanterns. Let’s row about a bit and see if we can’t spot it.”

_On the stage, Maria glowed, bathed in stormy light. Her voice rose up like a fountain of clearest water, bubbling and soaring. A crew of ragged sailors cowered before her until their captain - he wore a frayed purple coat that set him apart from the worn brown and cream of the sailors - crawled to her. On his knees, his song joined with hers, low and weary notes beseeching her aid. She noticed him, turned to flee in a swish of aqua chiffon silk, then hesitated, returned, cocked her head and listened._

_Daryl, however often she patronized the Opera House, rarely found herself engrossed in the material. It was strange and opaque. Even when she understood the language of the performance, it was so elongated and garbled to suit the songs that she couldn’t follow it. Setzer laughed at her. He seemed to have no trouble with the form. He would hand her the libretto and say, “It’s all in there, darling. Read it between acts, you’ll have less trouble.”_

_She always handed the libretto back. “Between acts is fundraising time, you cur, and you know it.”_

_No, there was only one thing that drew Daryl to return, again and again, to the Opera House._

_Maria._

_On stage, Maria took the shipwrecked captain’s hand and raised him to his feet. Song poured out of her in a gushing flood, and the bruised purple and grey cotton curtains overhead parted, showing a starry painted sky. The chorus joined in, men and women in storm colored costumes withdrawing to allow room for women in blue and silver tutus, men in navy jackets and silver tights. Maria’s voice soared above them all, clean and clear and piercing._

Daryl, straining her exhausted eyes gazing at a rapidly darkening sea, wished ruefully that they had such a water spirit to aid them now. Or better yet, that she was back in the opera box with Setzer, sipping wine, watching Maria sing.

They didn’t find the mast, which didn’t surprise Daryl, not at this point. Disaster ruled the day, finding it would’ve been too much like good luck. Dorothe and a silent Moneo got to work rigging a makeshift mast from two oars and some spare clothes. Daryl patted the boy on the shoulder as she slid past him. It wasn’t his fault. She should’ve run some more parachute drills, gotten him more comfortable with the procedure.

She took out her compass, pocket chronometer, and backstaff. “Moon’s up, ‘steria. Got the charts?”

With careful measurements and double-checking, they determined their position. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t good, either. The nearest landfall was along the northern part of the Jidoorian coast, much too close to Zozo. “We could aim for the Soron Current,” she murmured. A stream of cold water that ran north to south past Kohlingen down to the tip of the Jidoorish peninsula, aiming for it was a high-risk, high-reward endeavor. She’d thought to aim for it earlier, when they still had a good-sized ship, and weapons aboard. 

Possibly they would run into helpful merchant ships, and be saved that way. On the other hand, Gestahlian privateers prowled the shipping lanes. Though Figaro was nominally an ally of the empire, Daryl would still prefer not to end up in their hands. The common people told stories of the laboratories in Vector, the places that the empire’s unearthly magitek had come out of. Stories of inhuman monsters, of arcane rituals with crystals and candles, of torture and human experimentation. The rumors passed around the Royal Society were less fanciful, but not less dark.

The spy who’d stolen the early drafts for the _Falcon_ had been Imperial. His message hadn’t reached his handlers, it was intercepted by a private citizen, a gillionaire who’d built the _Blackjack_ off of those plans, before Setzer swindled it out from under him, but Daryl had been the one to uncover and report the spy. She didn’t think the Gestahlian military would’ve conveniently forgotten that in the intervening years.

There was still a worse danger. Zozoan pirates. At least in Imperial hands, there would be a veneer of civilized treatment, and the hope of ransom. The pirates, if they did not kill them as soon as look at them, would take them as slaves. Daryl had seen a few escaped slaves, with manacle scars on wrists and ankles, lash marks on their backs, and flinching habits. There was a starved and hollow look to them, even if they’d been free for years.

A loss of her freedom frightened her more than anything, but she thought, for herself, she’d risk the current. The pirates preyed on it infrequently, doing most of their hunting on the Inner Sea. But she wasn’t making the decision for herself only.

Raffe couldn’t row, that was for sure. So that left five able bodies, at two watches of twelve hours each. Owing to the ungainly shape of the raft and undersized, jury-rigged sail, even if they had a good wind and a clear sea, they might skim along at four, four and a half knots at top speed. If the wind didn’t favor them, they could row, with occasional breaks, at about two and a half to three knots. They had about four hundred and fifty seven nautical miles to cover, so assuming clear weather, that was seven days of rowing. She looked over at the waxed bags containing the food. They had enough for 10 days, and she could cut their rations down if needed.

“If we go due south for five days, we’ll pull past the Gosshook Peninsula, and we can head two more days southeast for Jidoor. It’ll be harder work than the current, but less risky.”

“Mm.” Asteria surveyed the charts a moment more. “Yeah. We can make that.”

“Alright. It’s decided.” She turned to the crew. Dorothe had a hand on the boom line, and Raffe seemed asleep. The memory of the ragged sailors onstage, their faces weathered and hollowed by greasepaint instead of the real damage of the world, fluttered through her mind. She told them the plan, clenched her jaw, and informed them of what was obvious by now. “Merada and Drew didn’t jump. It’s the six of us who will survive this. I’m counting on you all to stay alive, so we can properly honor their memories when we make it home.”

“Aye, ma’am,” they answered in solemn chorus. Even Hitchens refrained from his usual gloomy commenting.

“Dorothe, you’re on first watch with me. Raffe will join us once he recovers. Asteria has the second watch with Hitchens and Moneo. For now, you three rest.” She watched them settle in. Moneo put another coat over Raffe and curled beside him. Hitchens rested his head on a waxed bag of flour. Asteria, again, simply sank down where she was, sleeping sitting upright on a bench with her arms crossed across her chest. Daryl took an oar, and she and Dorothe began rowing.

Four days passed in relative smoothness. The skies were overcast with occasional rain showers, but the wind was northerly and they made good progress. The jury rigged mast worked alright, and Moneo’s shame ebbed. Raffe, despite the hole in his neck, felt well enough to sit and talk and assist in small tasks. Hitchens rigged a small, elevated fire inside a metal tin and boiled beans and baked biscuits, prophesying all the while that he was sure to knock it over and burn the raft up, condemning them all to watery graves. Oddly enough, this comforted his crewmates. His gloomy predictions were, in the midst of their tribulations, familiar and homelike.

On the fourth night, the wind shifted and began blowing from the east. The air grew thick and heavy, and the sun rose red. A storm was coming.

“Get that mast down,” Daryl ordered. They had already used the extra oars to make it; if one broke, they had nothing to repair or replace it with. They tied everything securely, lashing it all down, while the sea grew rough around them.

Daryl doled out their daily rations before she stowed the bags. To judge by the clouds piling up on the horizon, they might be in for quite a blow. She didn’t want to get into the bags more often than she had to, to keep their remaining food from spoiling. As she gnawed a poor sandwich made of two flour biscuits, a sad leaf of greens, and a strip of boiled beef, Moneo came to sit beside her.

She set aside her meal, eyeing him with concern. His face was drawn again, as it had been the first day aboard. He’d removed his right shoe and stocking, carrying them in his hand, and was half barefoot. “What now?”

He flinched at the tone of her voice and stared into the bottom of the raft rather than meet her eyes. “I’m sorry, Captain. I tried ignoring it for a bit, but -”

“Out with it, Moneo.”

The lad drew up his foot across his knee. Along the inner side of it, a swollen red gash oozed white and yellow pus. “I thought it was just bruised -”

“Hitchens!” The cook looked up from changing the dressing on poor Raffe’s neck. Having been put in charge of nursing, he was carrying the potions. “Come over here.” Daryl looked at Moneo’s foot again. “At least you brought it up immediately when you realized. We’ll clean it out, lad, and get a potion down you. Don’t worry.”

A few light drops of rain began spitting down as they drained the infected flesh. The sky grew dark, and they had to use a lantern to see enough to finish. The wound wasn’t terribly deep, but it was wide, and the infection had been eating at it under wet leather and linen with nothing done for it for days, and Moneo walking around on it to boot. Daryl regretted her early decision not to give Asteria and Moneo potions for their parachute mishap. If the boy had taken one then, the cut would’ve sealed at once. Now the healing would be harder.

“Alright, that’s as good as we can do here. Thank you, Hitchens.”

Hitchens, tying their medical kit in its leather bag back under a seat, shook his head. “Ah, it’s a bad one, alright. Drop right off, like as not.” 

Moneo, his skin dull as sodden sailcloth, managed a smile. “Thanks for your prognosis, oh respected doctor.”

“Curl up,” Daryl ordered him. “Sleep as much as you’re able to help the potion do its work.”

Dorothe, already tucked into her oiled greatcoat in preparation for the storm, held one wing of it open, inviting her protege under with her. He tucked himself in beside her, one foot in his own buckled shoe, and the other wrapped in bandages and protected by an empty waxed canvas bag cinched around his ankle.

At the prow, Asteria called out, “Captain -” The rest of her sentence was lost under a sudden opening of the heavens, as the rain came drumming down. Daryl took the few splashing steps forward.

“Yes? What was it?”

Her second in command shrugged. “I was offering to switch watches. I can do enough bailing to keep us afloat.”

“Well, that’s a kind offer.” Daryl grinned ruefully. “And I suppose one of us ought to keep awake to shout if we capsize.”

Leagues ahead, a fork of lightning danced horizontally across the ocean. In its stark light, Asteria smiled her own tired smile. “That does seem like the most likely end to this run of ill luck.” But she clapped Daryl on the back, a hearty blow with nothing in it of surrender.

Daryl returned amidships and sat next to Raffe. He rubbed his eyes and shook his head. “Hope it passes quickly,” he mumbled.

The sky was black to the east of them, and only a faint greyish light came from the west. Daryl put an arm around his shoulders. “Sleep, Raffe. It’ll go by faster if you sleep.”

His mouth quirked up. “Pity we don’t have a Gold Needle left. You could just petrify me through this.”

“Sorry, left them aboard,” she said, then regretted it. The needles and the Stone Knife weren’t all that had been left aboard the dying _Falcon_ , and to remind Raffe of Drew’s loss was unkind of her. For the rest of them, grief had taken a backseat to the business of surviving, but Raffe and Drew had been like brothers, and with lighter work to do than the rest, he also had less to distract him from his sorrow.

He said nothing, but his mouth wobbled and he squeezed his eyes tight. She shook his shoulder. “We’ll see them again someday,” she said in a low voice. “You know it. A Phantom Ship will take our fares, and we’ll sail out, and somewhere, on some strange sea, we’ll see them again. The parting is not forever.”

The rain came down very hard after that, like the ocean had come up all around them but thoughtfully left holes in itself so they could still breathe. Daryl elected not to sleep, but to join Asteria in bailing.

The weather came in cycles, with waves battering them about for a few hours like a toy boat and soaking everything, then easing into a gentler rain, almost a sprinkle at times, and then smacking back into them full force. It was no ship-killer, this storm. Larger craft out there would have no issue working through it. The trouble was that they were such a small boat, and they hadn’t a hope of steering because of the risk of losing or breaking an oar. When Daryl checked the wind, it was driving them southwest. South was good, taking them nearer to Jidoor. West was very bad, taking them farther from land.

During one of the heavy stretches, Daryl sat curled up, her coat collar pulled up high, with Raffe tucked beside her. He’d started shivering this morning, and his skin was hot to the touch. They’d ground up another potion and had him drink it diluted.

She wished they had more potions. She wished it with enough desperation that if her father, who’d cast her out homeless and orphaned into the snow, appeared now and offered her a bag of them, she’d kiss his tired face and thank him with complete sincerity.

Of course, if she was wasting time wishing, she should wish they were all safe at home, at port in South Figaro. Or better, in Jidoor, with the _Blackjack_ moored close by.

_Jidoor’s rainy season wasn’t too bad, Daryl thought. It was brief, for one thing. Storms rode up on the city, howled and fussed with gale force for a day or two, abated into gentle week-long drizzles, then another storm arrived and began the pattern over. The whole season was finished in two months. Compared to the blizzards of her childhood that buried Kohlingen in drifts higher than the windows for four months of the year, with surprise snowstorms coming and going for two months on either end, it was paradise._

_Setzer agreed with her. They often took walks together, down to the shops, spending profligrantly on sweet, sticky pastries and having new clothes fitted at the tailors. On the way back, they plucked early fruit from branches hanging over the garden walls, with the rain drifting down around them, misting in their hair. This was a pleasure reserved only for this time of year, when most others stayed indoors, sheltering from their brief period of inclement weather. Only servants on errands and the most desperate of beggars were out on the streets. When spring hit properly, the sidewalks would be crowded as the social season of visits and festivals began, and the fruits would all be picked._

_“Reminds me of home,” he said one afternoon, when the sun was peeping out, raising hazy steam from the tiled walkways._

_“Oh?” Daryl inquired. Setzer didn’t talk much about his childhood, even to her or Maria, who’d laid their life stories bare sometime in the third year of their arrangement. Setzer was more likely to deflect with a joke or insult than he was to offer up anything about his life before becoming the Wandering Gambler. He did the same now._

_“Yes. Always beautiful, but only enjoyable when no else is about.”_

_He played coy, but there were clues enough to figure some things out. He’d been born wealthy, that was clear, a member of society. The graces and nuances that Daryl and Maria worked hard for, for the sake of their separate ambitions, he manipulated and broke with an unconscious ease that said he’d learned the rules from his cradle on. He was better read than either of them, though not as specialized as they were. He knew a surprising amount about farm management, suggesting his family were countryside landowners. News of the empire’s expansions made him short and tetchy, and he took great pleasure in defrauding Imperials at the gaming tables. His accent was unplaceable, but he used South Continental slang more than Northern._

_Dispossessed Tzen nobility, was Daryl’s guess. Disowned by a rich and upwardly-mobile northern Marandan farm family, thought Maria. Six years into their affair, it seemed unlikely that he’d tell them. If he had any intention of doing so, he would have done it._

_Maria didn’t mind. One evening, curled against Daryl, she’d said it made him seem more romantic. Like he’d swept fully formed out of one of her operas._

_It didn’t bother Daryl, either. She understood the desire to shed an old life like a snake skin, and never return to it. Still, she filed this little tidbit away. The weather in Jidoor was at least a little bit like that of his birthplace. It lent credence to her Tzen theory._

_The ladder on the_ Blackjack _was ornate, segmented bronze. It was fancier-looking than the knotted rope used on the Falcon and probably appealed to its clientele, but was slippery in the rain. “Should I put a book together on when one of your louts will slip and break his neck on this?" she teased as she climbed._

_Setzer flashed a grin down over his shoulder. "You're too late, unless it's neck-breaking you're after specifically. My crew has one running on broken legs. We've had three so far, but we provided complimentary healing and it didn't keep them from coming back to the tables later."_

_There was no one on deck; the crews of both airships had a day's liberty. Some of Setzer's crew were Jidoorian, they were probably home with their families. The rest had their choice of rain-shelters, running the gamut from libraries to brothels._

_In the captain's bedroom, among the fine black cotton coverlets with their gold braid trim and the golden sheets, Maria lay curled like a sleeping nymph, or like a pearl on the tongue of a gilded midnight oyster. Each time they visited, it seemed harder to winkle her out of the Impresario’s clutches. Maria had caught the professional success she’d long chased, but it came at a cost. A diva’s time was not her own, and though she’d earned enough three times over to purchase herself back from the Opera House, no one there was eager to let her go._

_Setzer set the tapestry bag containg their day’s purchases on a table with a_ thump _that woke the singer. "Mmm," she sighed, and stretched luxuriously. The rain began coming down again, tap-tapping at the round porthole windows. Maria's eyes cracked peevishly open. "Is it_ still _raining?"_

_"You slept right through a break in the clouds, songbird," Setzer informed her, rummaging through the bag. He held out a flower shaped pastry of sweet dough dipped in sugar syrup. "Can I tempt you to climb out of there?"_

_Maria turned over in the bed, ignoring the enticement and glaring at the nearest window. Daryl took off her damp coat and sat down beside her on the bed. "We picked plums, if you want one." The plums were small and purple-green, cold and tart on the tongue._

_Maria shook her head and traced patterns on Daryl's thigh, her fingernail tickling through the velvet. "I hate the rain," she sighed. "It makes me feel trapped. It seems like I can see the bars of my cage."_

_In response, Daryl smoothed a hand over Maria's hair. She raised a long, pale gold lock of it to her lips, kissing it gently. "I tell you, songbird, say the word, and we'll swoop in and take you away."_

_The singer smiled up at her. She turned onto her back and ran a hand up Daryl’s side, curling it behind her neck to pull her down for a lingering kiss._

_The bed creaked as Setzer set a knee on it. “We do mean it,” he said in a low voice. “We’ll sneak you out in the dead of night, if you like. Or if you want it to be more dramatic, we’ll crash a performance and steal you away in front of the whole audience.”_

_“Mmm, I’d like that,” Maria murmured. “Soon. I want to do ‘Maria and Draco’ first. That’d be the perfect capstone to my career. I can leave with joy after that.”_

The storm petered out on the third day, throwing fitful gusts of rain-laden wind at them like a toddler still fussing that it didn't want to sleep even as its eyes drifted shut. As soon as the sun appeared, Daryl unwrapped their navigation equipment and made careful measurements.

The numbers weren’t good. They were about as far from land again as they were four days ago. She’d put the crew on two-thirds rations during the storm, on the grounds that they weren’t expending as much energy as when they had to row. If she kept them at that rate, that left them seven days worth of food. Not much wiggle room, there.

“We could cut it further back,” Asteria suggested, weighing a bag of oranges in her hand. 

Daryl shook her head. “We still need enough strength to row.” She met Asteria’s eyes. They’d both heard of what happened at sea when the food ran out.

Raffe died that afternoon. He’d talked nonsense the day before, pleading to be allowed to return home to Tzen; his voice like a little boy’s. He hadn’t woken at all since the rain had stopped. It was Hitchens who realized, when he went to pour a thin fish and bean soup down the carpenter’s throat and the man didn’t wake.

Daryl met Asteria’s eyes again, and decided, _not yet._ They weren’t that badly off, not just yet. And her heart rebelled as well. She’d screwed up her promise to Drew to look after him. To use his body in such a manner would add intolerably to that failure.

She watched as they tied his limbs together and slipped his body into the sea. They had nothing to weight him with, and he stayed floating alongside the raft as one by one, they each dropped in a gil after him, the coins glinting as they sank.

“His spirit will go now,” she said. “He will pay his fare and board a Phantom Ship. Perhaps, on its voyage, it will stop at Tzen so that he can see his home and family there, one last time. It may then take him to strange shores, but somewhere on those far seas, he will meet again our friends Drew and Merada. And someday, when we each have breathed out our last, we too will join them, and raise sails together once more.”

_On her hill, the night after exploring the Sea Queen’s tomb, Setzer came up and wrapped his warm arms around her chilled body from behind. “None but you, love, could enjoy this kind of weather.”_

_She laughed. “Doesn’t it make you feel great? Doesn’t it remind you that you’re alive?”_

_“No. It makes me fear I’m about to catch cold.”_

_She turned in his embrace and put her arms around his neck. Their breath mingled in faint white clouds. “When I die, dear, if I go before you -”_

_“What?”_

_“Bury me someplace like that. Sell my clothes, that’ll net you a tidy profit. Build me something grand to lie in state in. Keep my darts, though, and win some games with them.”_

_His skin was silver in the moonlight, his purple eyes looked black. His scarred mouth crooked up unsteadily. “Are you joking with me?”_

_“No, I mean it.”_

_One of his hands ran up her back, then returned to her waist and pulled her closer, so their bodies pressed together. He rested his face against hers, shaking his head slowly. “It’s very strange that a free spirit like you would want to be entombed in cold earth. I would have supposed you’d want to be buried at sea or have your body left on a wild hilltop somewhere.”_

_“That does seem more like me, doesn’t it?” she chuckled. “No. Truly, I’d like to have something grand and formal, something that will last centuries, so my memory will linger. We’ve forgotten the Sea Queen’s name in Kohlingen, but not that she had a tomb, and not that she deserved her title. Maybe, once I’m gone, you can start a legend about me. The Sky Queen.”_

They rowed away, leaving Raffe adrift on the waves. There was no alcohol, but any time someone drank from their allotment of fresh water that day, they raised their ladle first, and made a toast to his memory.

At the watch change that evening, during the time they were all awake, Asteria and Daryl checked their position again. They’d made good progress, and if the weather pattern held to the typical, they wouldn’t encounter another storm for about a week, right about when they should be making landfall anyway. They ate dinner, a chop up of beef and raisins and grape and biscuit, and it was almost delicious.

After eating, Daryl yawned and stretched and lay down. She had almost drifted off when a raised voice woke her. She looked over, and saw Asteria and Hitchens bent over Moneo’s unwrapped foot. A lantern cast yellow light over the damaged appendage, and the black veins stood out like tattoos on the swollen skin. She went over to see if the view improved on closer inspection, but it was worse up close.

It was Moneo’s cry of alarm that had woken her. Hitchens repeated the pronunciation that had provoked it for Daryl’s benefit. “It should come off.”

“No,” Moneo said. “No, that’s only a joke. We still have a potion, don’t we? Let me have that.”

“It’s been a week now, lad,” said Asteria. “If it was going to get better, it would’ve started by now.”

Dorothe was up now, too. She put her hands on Moneo’s shoulders, comforting and stabilizing. “Better have it off now. You don’t want the leg gone, too.”

Even under the yellow lantern light, they could see how he blanched at the idea.

Daryl ruffled his hair. “Well, Moneo, it’s piss-poor luck, isn’t it? Don’t fret too much. We’ll take it off and get the potion in you right away, and when we get back to Figaro, they can make you a new one of ivory and bronze, and gild it if you want.”

Hitchens got his cleaver, and they did the deed there and then, Moneo with a leather scroll-case clenched between his teeth. He chewed up a potion as soon as it was through, and the stump scabbed over in minutes.

The cook took the bloody foot and made to throw it overboard. Asteria caught his arm just in time.

“Store that overnight, Hitchens,” Daryl ordered. “We don’t want it going to waste. We can use it to fish with tomorrow, and maybe stretch out the rations.”


	4. Must Converge

_It was dark backstage. Through a crack in the wall, a brilliant shaft of white calcium light poured, but it illuminated only drafty corridor. No one was around to see, to interrupt…_

_Maria giggled, and Daryl pressed more kisses to her neck, the hollow of her throat, the top of each perfect breast. “Songbird…” she sighed._

_“Your songbird,” Maria said. “Yours and his, forever.”_

_Daryl was kissing her hands now, soft and perfumed with jasmine oil. How had she gotten so far from Maria’s mouth, her pink pretty mouth that sang so sweetly?_

_“My love, a world apart from me…_

_Call me your home, and I shall_

_Call myself yours for all time…”_

_Her high, sweet voice blended with the violins and flutes that rose in the room next door, with the wind that whistled through the corridor. It snapped the sails, and Setzer looked over from his position at the wheel. His hair blew out like a silver banner behind him._

_“Come home, love. We’re missing you terribly.”_

_“I’m here with you now, you ass,” she said. “What other home do we have?”_

_“I fear we’ll never see you again.”_

Daryl woke with a start. A dream. For a moment, it had felt very real. She looked around. There was a hint of pink on the eastern horizon. The sun was minutes from coming up. The sail belled out full. Asteria and Hitchens were pulling at the oars. Dorothe was snoring, and Moneo’s head was resting on her shoulder, his mouth slack, spit running down onto her greatcoat. As Daryl watched, he snorted and closed his mouth, but inside a minute, he was deeply asleep again and drooling once more.

She stood, stretching out her arms, rolling her neck, and rotating her shoulders, ready to get about the business of the day.

She would make it home. She would get them all home.

Her conversation before the race with Setzer, before they’d gone aloft on their test, came back to her. If she’d died then of elevation sickness, she would have accepted it, because Asteria or Merada would’ve taken the _Falcon_ to Setzer.

But if there was one thing Daryl refused to do, it was die without leaving something behind, some memory of herself in the world. She wouldn’t just vanish into the sea out here, with no one knowing what had happened. She would see Maria and Setzer again.

And already, that clean and heedless part of her that pushed recklessly ahead, that drove her on, drank down the crisp ocean wind and thought of how, once she was ashore, once she had seen her crew safe with their friends and families, once she’d spent an uninterrupted week in bed with Setzer and Maria, she would go look for the _Falcon’s_ wreckage. She would see if it could be salvaged. She thought of how she would raise funds for the work, or how she might gain captaincy of one of the next set of airships the Society was building. She thought of returning to the sky again, getting even closer to the stars...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, Wallwalker, I hope you enjoy. I really loved your short Setzer/Daryl/Maria fics and incorporated a number of shoutouts to them, though the bulk of the story is my own headcanons. While I was brainstorming ideas for your gift, I was reading and watching a number of 18th/19th century stories and adaptations, including a bunch of things about Victorian-era maritime disasters, and this story grew out of that foundation. I liked writing a story where the writing seems to be on the wall and everything goes wrong, but the protagonist never gives up. The best way to survive a disaster does seem to be a steely-eyed combination of practicality and hope, and although canonically Daryl doesn't survive this, I invite you to imagine a sequel, set years later, with she and her crew having survived on a remote island...


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